Durable collapsible or foldable container assemblies have long been sought after by the shipping and packaging industries as a whole. Packaging and shipping of goods, such as loose, heavy automotive parts, has required the use of disposable cartons which must be knocked down, disassembled and often discarded following only one use. Moreover, use of cardboard boxes or other cartons requires that they be stacked upon scaffolds or pallets, usually of wood, in order to facilitate their loading and unloading via fork-lift trucks. This typically necessitates metal straps or other securing means for keeping the boxes situated upon the pallets, including sheets of plastic material to protect the entire shipping package from the elements.
Another material handling technique for loose parts is using wire cages having sides foldable outwardly or downwardly and secured at the corners thereof by hooks, metal posts or the like; however, the metal posts are not foldable downward, nor can the assembly be easily compacted into a shipping pallet once used. These wire mesh cage assemblies, although stackable on top of one another via the metal corner posts, are quite heavy due to the weighty metal base required for strength. Conversely, where the metal posts were not used, the foldable sides did not of themselves withstand sufficiently the outward load exerted when the container was full.
Industry has used a plastic stackable pallet, which is molded especially to carry a particular part, for example, carburetors for certain automobiles. Parts are placed among an array of specially formed indentations in a pallet which is then stacked upon a similiarly loaded pallet having cooperating recesses and projections therefor. Of course, these types of containers did not have sides.
Heretofore, there has not been a satisfactory foldable container assembly formed of lightweight durable material which may be loaded and stacked upon a similar container and then folded into a compact pallet for storage or shipping while empty.